In a previous post, ‘“You’ll own nothing?” We never owned anything (and that’s not okay)‘, I mentioned that Digital Distribution changed the game.

I wanna quote myself here because this is important:

With the advent of digital distribution as a whole, licenses also became digital, so did the games. But that also means that if you wanna scrub a game off the internet, it’s much easier.

That last part is the whole reason many folks are annoyed at the prospect of the digital only future.

A few weeks ago, Sony announced that ‘Physical disc production’ was ‘ending in January 2028 for new games releasing on PlayStation consoles’. This got a lot of people with their panties in a bunch, for the lack of a better term, over the fact that physical media was gonna get killed in 2028, about a year and a half from now.

This ‘enraged’ the internet, journalists and gamers, and you can see the comments related to anything about PlayStation is ‘bring back physical media’ or whatever.

Once again, this is the most clueless decision and the arguing is also just as pointless, most because of two distinct reasons.

One: Physical media has lost a lot of ground in recent years. People are just buying digital because it’s more convenient. And even worse than that, even if you do buy physical, it often allows you to download the rest of the game, since the Blu-Ray it comes with is limited to only 50GB of storage. This acts essentially as a CD-Key for a game, similar to what Nintendo did with their Game-Key cards for the Switch 2.

Sales for physical media essentially crated in 10 years, and the numbers aren’t positive for the next years either.

Two: Gamers can’t boycott anything. The internet masks the true correlation between faked or pumped up numbers and real numbers. They aren’t an united workforce, fighting for better work conditions or whatever. These are games, they are a pastime, and absolutely not needed for you to live. You can go along just fine without playing games, which makes this ‘united’ force limited to mostly closed circles and groups, Reddit (which is like 1% of the internet), Twitter or closed groups in social media (loud minority) and similar things. In other words, unless it’s something that affects the actual majority of gamers, it’ll probably going to go under the rug pretty quickly.

Remember the L4D2 Boycott? Or the MW2 2009 Boycott? None of them worked, and the companies (Valve and Activision) sold a ton of these games back because gamers are not a race, just a group of people with a thing they like.

It’s also infuriating to go see discussions on many places and all the comments are ‘hurr durr PlayStation bad cuz they are killing physical media’ or ‘I’ll buy the disc’. No you won’t, you moron. You’re not doing it now, you’re not gonna start doing it.

Real Use Cases

Before you ask ‘what about video game collectors?’, I’ll say this: If you’re not a video game collector already, this is not affecting you in any way.

Gamers want to game, so they buy and play game. It doesn’t matter where it is from, physical or digital. Video game collectors like collecting cases of games, but they also like to play games. If they see value on plastic cases, that’s one thing, but these people are in a very small minority (redundant words, yes but it needs to expressed how small they are). How many video game collectors do you know? That aren’t Youtubers that is.

The used games market is definitely take a hit over this, and honestly? Considering how expensive some used games are, it might be a good shake-up. People selling games over 60 USD, sometimes 100 or 200 USD or more.

In any case, there are real good use cases for having physical media, and I don’t think it should go away. One of them is the ability to have something physical. Even it’s not the whole game, it could be something that could look forward to have with you.

Another good thing about physical is that the fact that it gives people the illusion of being owners of something, which I guess is something.

We’ve Been There Already

But unfortunately, PlayStation’s decision is not illogical and the thing they want to do has been around already, and people are conveniently, selectively forgetting about it.

PC has been disc-less for ages now, since the advent of Steam and many other digital distribution stores and the like. Do you remember the last time you got a PC game on a disc?

Xbox has gone halfway with digital as well, with many version of their consoles being digital only, and because they can’t stop dying or committing death to themselves, they pulled out of many markets and also pulled off physical games. If you live in a market where they pulled out, buying games for you has been a digital process unless you wanna import physical copies from another country.

Nintendo is still committed to physical media, but they also have their own digital store, and of course, the Switch 2 has Game-Key cards, where the game is allowed to be downloaded from the internet once you have it inside the Switch 2, acting how several Blu-Ray discs for PlayStation and Xbox act nowadays.

And PlayStation had done the same too, with a PlayStation 5 that didn’t have a disc, for a cheaper price. And many people bought it.

What I Would Do

I still see value on physical media, but it doesn’t need to optical media necessarily. If anything, offering cartridges like how the Switch 2 or even the old PlayStation Vita did is a good idea. Granted, DRAM is all fucked in the head with its pricing at the moment, but even then, it’s possible to make something like a 128GB or 256GB flashdrive-like cartridge that contains game data.

Just slot it into your PlayStation 6 or whatever and play the game. It solves the issue for physical optical media for consoles and allows physical media to still exist.

I’m Tired, Man

I’m tired of hearing out comments on what people do or don’t with their games. Gamers are pretty bad at boycotting stuff because it’s not really an united movement, and considering how people do actually buy digital nowadays, in an overwhelming major way, removing physical optical media can be a good way out, and even if PlayStation is expecting to take a hit from it, it might be for a good cause, maybe. Who knows.

What I want is to make sure it never dies out completely, because it would be pretty stupid to kill it in this way. If it was up to me, I’d do what I mentioned and make sure that we could still have some sort of physical media there.

‘We never owned anything‘ is the sentence that people come back to try to explain how ‘Sony wants to control the market’ but one thing only follows the other. The market can have some aversion to decisions but the loudest voices in the room are pointless if they cave because their favorite game is on the line.

If you want to make your voice heard, act like the customer you are, not just a racist stupid moron of a gamer: Don’t buy it if you don’t like it.

Closing Words

With some hope, the DRAM pricing will go down and kill AI finally, and we could enjoy lower prices again because it sucks. It sucks because it’s affecting everything and the fact they’d rather kill physical optical media without offering a cartridge alternative is really poor planning in my opinion.

But acting like we didn’t see this coming is also stupid because if you have a phone or a PC made in the last 5 years, you haven’t seen optical media or even physical media in almost any shape or form, maybe if you were building the PC and needed to install the operating system, and that’s essentially it.

Still, I don’t think we should have a fully realized Digital Only Future. Maybe keep physical to make sure people can still feel good about a piece of plastic that has something inside of it, just so you can say: “Yeah, they won’t take this from me”. If that makes you feel better, go all for it.